There is something about the Stalinist mind that won't go away. Like a bee seeking nectar, it flits from cause to cause, humming the same tune: If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem.

This time, the critter has hit the main vein, because there is a nasty word that reifies "part of the problem," viz., "racist." If you're not part of the solution, you're racist. Indeed, even if you ARE part of the solution, it's because you are racist and must get to work rolling the rock of "dismantling racism" up the hill of human nature. You will not be able to do enough. At the end of the day, you will STILL be racist. Like those poor dogs at the race track, you will never catch the rabbit.

Anyone who actually cares about racism will look for solutions that work better than they feel. Those solutions begin with plus-sum economic action, ways to assure minorities a bigger piece of a growing pie. White people won't care that Black people are becoming more equal, so long as White people are doing better. From a human engineering perspective, inclusion in a plus-sum effort is way more doable than confiscations, material or metaphorical.

Ending racism requires work by the victims to ready themselves for equality. It is PC nonsense to suggest that racism harms people and then pretend that they are not to some extent disabled by the harm. The whole point of Brown v. Board of Education was that Black kids were learning to be second-class citizens. What are we doing to undo that damage? What should Black leaders be doing?

Racism is in our genes. We can suppress it, but like the puritanical urge, it won't go away until our genes don't feel threatened by otherness. That will happen when intermarriage blurs the lines. There are some who believe that race is a form of biodiversity that must be preserved, and others who believe it is a source of strife that must be conquered. At this point, we probably don't have the tools to say which view better conduces to survival of the species. But for those who see racism as a net liability, a REASONED approach to the problem, one that does not ask ordinary people to be extraordinary all the time, is what we need to seek. Performative utopianism is not the answer.